What do I need to be a bedroom / no plans on going public / turntablist?
March 10, 2014 4:29 PM   Subscribe

I am obsessed with DJ Yoda, who is a pretty famous turntablist DJ. Example of his work In a nutshell, he takes either existing music or beats he creates on his own and mixes it with dialogue samples from other music, tv shows, movies, etc.....Add some scratching and all that type of stuff. I wanna learn how to do that. What do I need?

I have a MacBook Pro and an Ipad. I am not against spending a little money to build up this hobby. I don't have intentions of sharing anything nor taking it public. strictly for my own enjoyment.... With the limited research I have done, this seems to be a popular console for DJ's, I know their is free software and purely computer based programs as well, but I do like the idea of having a separate console to work with..... I have a itunes library of about 45,000 songs to work with, and a ton of Horror DVD's which I have a ton of dialogue samples I'd love to pull as well.... Where should I start?
posted by TwilightKid to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: There are several things going on with his music, but mostly he's using some sort of sampler to chop up the bits he wants to use, and then using a digital audio workstation (daw) to arrange it all together.

You should, presumably, have GarageBand on your MacBook. That's a DAW, and a powerful little one to boot.

You should be able to drag an mp3 in to a new audio track in GarageBand and splice the bit you want to play with, deleting the rest of the mp3. Whapow, you now have a sample. You can do this however many times you want or start experimenting with other music programs like Audacity, Logic or Ableton.

The console you linked is fine, I guess, but seems geared more to the beatmatching of existing mp3s rather than creating new songs from samples. If you want to be more like dj yoda, you will eventually gravitate towards a proper sampler, like this one:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QeOZUDpUiuk

Honestly, I would dick around with GarageBand first if I were you, it's dead easy to use and will introduce you to the wonderful world of arranging audio.
posted by BlerpityBloop at 10:26 PM on March 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


I don't advice on how to achieve this, but if you want more inspiration, I found Le Youth provide the same type of enjoyment.

Le Youth - C O O L

Le Youth - Dance With Me ft. Dominique Young Unique
posted by ellieBOA at 5:25 AM on March 11, 2014


Best answer: Hi, I used to be a DJ. If you want to do mash-ups, the quickest way to get into it is with ableton live, no ear-hand coordination required, it takes care of the beatmatching for you.

If you want to do proper turntablism, you should really buy a pair of CDJs like these.

Failing that, you can get a cheap-ass console and use traktor, but I don't think anyone really DJs that way -- most people that use traktor use time coded CDs on CDJs, I think, unless something has changed recently.

It takes about 3-6 months of several-hours-a-day practice to learn to beathmatch, and more than that to learn to scratch.
posted by empath at 6:16 AM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]


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